Red Thread in a Grey Cuff

Mabyn Scorrow had stitched her initials into the cuff of her grey cloak the night before, small and red. She wanted her brother on the far landing to know the money was hers, earned at the dye-vats and not begged from their father. At Sedge Lock the band-leader, a lean man named Ruel Ashdown, caught the colour as he walked the line.

“Unpick it or step out,” he said. “Five hundred of us look the same, or none of us do.”

Behind her the Throng shuffled toward the lock gates, five thousand and more, half again the day’s crowd. Passage was a tenth of a drop a span. She could cross alone, marked and proud, for next to nothing. Then she thought of the moneylender’s boy who loitered by her brother’s door, and of her father, who would want to know where every coin came from and what it had cost him.

Fishpond’s horn sounded from the kilns while the last link’s echo still hung over the water, barely twenty breaths between them, and the gatekeeper waved the grey line on. Mabyn took the needle from her collar and picked the red loops out one by one. The loose thread lifted off her fingers and away down the towpath. She pressed aboard with the others into the middle of the band, one grey shoulder among hundreds. Her brother would get the coin and never know whose it was. He would have to take it on trust. Tamsin Reedwater’s crew carried them over without a second look.